Additive manufacturing, also known as three-dimensional (3-D) printing, can be used for manufacturing an extremely wide array of 3-D objects. By utilizing additive manufacturing, the object designer has few restrictions on what he/she can create. Such unique, minimally restricted manufacturing can be performed in both a time-effective and cost-effective manner, when utilizing additive manufacturing.
In particular, additive manufacturing is valuable in the production of metal machine components because it can reduce the need for casting. Casting may be cost prohibitive, especially when used to create small-scale production components, such as parts for old machines, parts for small-scale produced machines, or custom components. By utilizing additive manufacturing of metal components, metal components can be manufactured in a cost-effective manner and time-effective manner.
Often, laser sintering techniques are employed to produce metal objects via additive manufacturing. Additive manufacturing employing laser sintering, often referred to as “selective laser sintering” (SLS) or “powder bead fusion” (PBF) techniques, involves using a laser to selectively heat a powdered material to bond the powder into a solid layer of an object. Powder bead fusion produces objects in a layer-wise manner, wherein each layer of the object is fused to the previous layer.
In powder bead fusion operations, build stability and build surface qualities are paramount to successful additive manufacturing of an object. To aid in structural stability of the object, improves have been made to the metallic powders, themselves, such that powders have been developed that include additives to stiffen the powder and, potentially, improve structural characteristics, as can be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 8,719,144 (“Powder for Layerwise Manufacturing of Objects”).
However, additives in the powder used may not be sufficient for providing a dense, ideal build of an object during PBF additive manufacturing. Accordingly, machines for performing PBF require, often time consuming, calibration to produce an optimum build, which is often based solely on trial and error and can be very time consuming. Therefore, systems, methods, and apparatus for additive manufacturing, wherein parameters of the build are efficiently configured for an ideal build, based on some empirical measures, are desired.